Phaeton (hypothetical planet)

Phaeton (or Phaëton, less often Phaethon) is the name of a hypothetical planet posited to have existed between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter whose destruction supposedly led to the formation of the asteroid belt. The hypothetical planet was named for Phaëton, the son of the sun god Helios in Greek mythology, who attempted to drive his father's solar chariot for a day with disastrous results and was ultimately destroyed by Zeus.

Olbers proposed that these new discoveries were the fragments of a disrupted planet that had formerly revolved around the sun. He also predicted that more of these pieces would be found. The discovery of the asteroid Juno by Karl Ludwig Harding and Vesta by Olbers buttressed the Olbers hypothesis.

Theories regarding the formation of the asteroid belt from the destruction of a hypothetical fifth planet are today collectively referred to as the disruption theory. This theory states that there was once a major planetary member of the solar system circulating in the present gap between Mars and Jupiter, which was variously destroyed when:

it veered too close to Jupiter and was torn apart by the gas giant's powerful gravity

In the twentieth century, Russian comet specialist Sergei Orloff named the planet Phaeton after the story in Greek myth.[1][2][3][4][5]

Today, the Phaeton hypothesis has been superseded by the accretion model.[6] Most astronomers today believe that the asteroids in the main belt are remnants of the protoplanetary disk, and in this region the incorporation of protoplanetary remnants into the planets was prevented by large gravitational perturbations induced by Jupiter during the formative period of the solar system.

In 1988, Donald W. Patten wrote a book entitled Catastrophism and the Old Testament outlining the theory that a planet he called Astra overtook Mars and, upon reaching the Roche limit, broke apart much like the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 did when it reached Jupiter's Roche limit in 1994.[7]